Résumé

I will be carrying out research into the nature of subjects. specifically, i will be examining what is involved in a subject's occupying a certain location in space. i will be arguing for a view on which where a subject of experience is located is, in part, explained by the location of that subject's perceptual point of view. i will be arguing against certain views that maintain, on the contrary, that subject. this second view underlies several prominent representationalist accounts of the nature of experience (in particular, visual experience). on such views, a visual experience is held to represent seen objects as being situated in relation to a vantage point, and the location of the subject will determine which vantage point things are represented as being situated in relation to. such accounts are thus committed to the idea that the point in relation to which tings, in experience, are presented as standing – the location of the subject's point of view – is determined by the location of the subject, and so the latter is something we can settle independently of the former. the assumption then tends to be that it is the location of the subject's body that explains the location of the subject, and so the location of the subject's body is the relevant contextual factor that determines where things in experience are presented as standing in relation to. i will argue that such accounts fail to adequately account for possible situations in which the signals from one subject's optic nerves are received by a second subject's visual cortex. the standard account would characterise the experience had by the second subject as a case of illusion, since things would be presented in his experience as standing in relation to the location that his body occupies, when, in fact, those things stand in relation to the location occupied by the body of the first subject. i will argue that this account is not satisfactory.